Saturday, December 10, 2011

Dragon Warrior (NES)

Dragon Warrior is a game that is very near and dear to my heart; it was one of the first RPGs I cut my teeth on, along side The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and Ultima: Exodus. When we got our first Nintendo
when I was young, we only had a few games for it, so those games ended
up being played so often and engraved into my brain that I'll never
forget them. Dragon Warrior being all the more fun because it came totally free with our subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Now that I'm older and have started collecting vintage Nintendo
games, I have a much larger collection - but I still love to take out a
few from my childhood and replay them for the nostalgic value. Often
I'll start up a game and instantly remember every single thing about it,
and this was the case with Dragon Warrior as well.

Dragon Warrior (known as Dragon Quest in Japan) is a role playing game that was developed by Chunsoft and published by Enix
in 1986, though it didn't make it to North America until 1989. It's
features a pretty standard story these days, where you're a stranger who
comes to the kingdom of Alefgard and is tasked with saving it's
princess and defeating the evil Dragonlord and recovering the Balls of Light
he has stolen. Along the way you fight monsters like slimes, magicians,
knights and dragons in random encounters on the world map, gaining
experience and gold as you go. You actually rescue the princess fairly
early in the game, and technically you can even skip rescuing her all
together. When you finish the game, she'll be back at home in the castle
anyway. If you do rescue her though, she gives you her "love" as an
item that you can use to tell you how much experience you need to level
up, as well as give you your coordinates on the world map. This is
helpful for finding one of the items necessary to complete the game, so
unless you're using a walkthrough or have beaten the game previously
it's probably best to go ahead and save her.

The world map is
setup in a tile-based overhead view, and your single character can walk
around in four directions. Enemies all have fixed stats and do not gain
in strength as you do. The map is pretty open, allowing you to travel
almost anywhere you want - but if you try to go to an area that's too
difficult the enemies will make mincemeat out of you. Crossing bridges
across rivers signify major changes in enemy difficulty though, so at
least you have some sort of warning that the difficulty is going to
increase as you travel. There are a number of different enemies in Dragon Warrior,
but many of them are just palette swaps (the same graphic as another
enemy, but colored differently). For example, the slime, red slime and
metal slime; or the drakee, drakeema and magidrakee. Departing from the
overhead view of the rest of the game, the enemy appears facing you in a
box that takes up the middle of your screen. Enemies only appear one at
a time, and you fight them in a turn-based fashion using a small menu
consisting of Fight, Spell, Run and Item commands.

There are
only a small number of different weapons and armors that you can equip,
but on the other hand this means that each new piece is a noticeable
upgrade. You can also obtain a limited number of items such as torches,
medicinal herbs, magical wings to transport you back to the starting
castle, etc. There aren't that many items, but it's almost a good thing
because you have very limited inventory space in Dragon Warrior.
You will often find yourself throwing away herbs or torches or something
that you wanted to keep because you need the room for other things. You
also start off not knowing any magic, and gain a new spell every few
levels, for a grand total of 10 spells. These spells allow you to heal
yourself, exit a cave, return to town, light up a cave, keep weak
enemies away for a brief time, hurt an enemy, put them to sleep or stop
them from using magic.

One thing that always annoyed me about Dragon Warrior
was the user interface. It's not exactly bad, but it's totally menu
driven, with lots of sub-menus to get anything done. Especially climbing
up and down stairs... instead of just walking onto the stairs, you also
must hit a button to bring up the menu and then select "Stairs" from
the menu. The same holds true for talking to people, opening doors or
treasure chests, searching the area... The other annoyance is the fact
that dungeons are all mazes that are pitch black. Using a torch
illuminates one square around you until you leave, while the Radiant
spell illuminates 3 squares around you and then reverts to 2 squares
after a while, then down to 1 square and finally disappears entirely. A
torch often isn't enough to help figure out the maze-like dungeons, and
you don't even learn the Radiant spell until level 9. This makes early
dungeons really annoying to traverse. Later ones aren't that much
better, because they're usually longer and filled with thougher enemies,
so you want to save your limited magic points for healing or battle
spells.

You have 3 "Adventure Logs" that allow players
to pick a name and a message display speed for 3 different games on the
cartridge. When we first got the game I wasn't the only family member
playing it, so it was nice that 3 of us could all play our own games
(one at a time). You can save your game by talking to the king and
recording your journey in the "Imperial Scrolls of Honor", and it
saves to the cartridge's battery backed RAM so there are no long
annoying code strings to input to continue. If you die, you're
transported back to the king, so it's often useful to suicide on purpose
rather than walk all the way back if you don't have any magical
transport wing items.

The vibrant and colorful artwork in Dragon Warrior was drawn by Akira Toriyama. Some may quickly recognize him as the creator of Dragon Ball, one of my favorite manga and anime series of all time. Characters in the game are drawn in the same style as Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda,
where they have short bodies and big heads. This makes it easier to add
details to the head where they'd be more recognizable than on the body,
and also makes the characters look more cute and fun. The character
style meshes well with the bold and colorful tiles that make up the
world, making the whole game look charming and appealing.

The music in Dragon Warrior
was composed by Koichi Sugiyama, who is well known for his composition
of Japanese television shows. It's beautiful and melodic, and some of my
favorite music from the Nintendo era. The soundtrack features
eight classic sounding pieces, including the introduction, castle, town,
world map, cave/dungeon, battle, final boss music and the ending track.
The world map music is free and airy, giving you a sense of freedom as
you explore. This is contrasted harshly by the dire battle music when
you engage in a random encounter with enemies. The music for the final
dungeon is ominous and foreboding - you know you're getting near the end when you walk into Charlock castle by the music alone.

I'd recommend that everyone should play Dragon Warrior at least once. If you have a working Nintendo, the game can be found for about $5 online. It has also been remade (along with Dragon Warrior II) for the Super Nintendo and the Gameboy Color
in a 2-game cartridge if you can play it that way. It's truly a fun
game, though it offers little replay value. Once you've beaten it, you
pretty much know everything there is to know about it. I still play it
every couple of years for the nostalgic value, but I can breeze through
it in a day now.

"Congratulations! Thou hast restored peace unto the world! But there are many roads yet to travel. May the light shine upon thee."